By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
The nation of Israel can do no wrong. The government of the Ukraine must be supported forever in its war with Russia.
That sums up the thinking behind some of the major foreign policy preferences of many Evangelical Protestants (EPs) today. But those views come with a high risk of cognitive dissonance.
Israel first (it could never be any other way, could it?) EPs never tire of repeating that Israel is the best friend of the US in the Middle East, or even the whole world, that ‘Judeo-Christian’ values and civilization are the greatest, that God loves Israel above every other people, tribe, and country and will never forsake her, and so on.
Most Evangelicals who support Israel have no clue that their entire religious system was made up in the 19th Century, and popularized in the 20th under the guise of “study notes.”
However, the moral and spiritual life inside Israel doesn’t match the EPs’ imagined reality. Regarding sexual ethics, Israel could hardly be friendlier to the LGBT ‘community’. A pro-Israel, pro-LGBT organization called StandWithUs provides a detailed timeline as evidence (PDF, p. 3):
- 1963: Israeli courts rule that sodomy laws should not apply to consenting adults in private.
- 1988: Israel abolishes the decades-old ban on sodomy of any kind.
- 1992: Legislation bars discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in the workplace.
- 1993: The Israeli army adopts a policy of allowing openly LGBTQ+ soldiers to serve in any capacity.
- 1994: The Israeli Supreme Court rules in favor of granting spousal benefits to same-sex couples.
- 1997: The Israeli Defense Minister announces that same-sex partners would be recognized as family members by the Defense Department. The Israeli High Court rules against censoring an educational TV program for teens about homosexuality.
- 2000: The Knesset lowers the legal age of consent for same-sex relations from 18 to 16, and the Israeli Supreme Court rules that lesbians can officially become adoptive mothers of their partners’ children.
- 2004: Israeli courts rule LGBTQ+ couples qualify for common-law marriage and LGBTQ+ couples qualify for full inheritance rights.
- 2005: Israeli LGBTQ+ couples are granted full adoption rights.
- 2006: Israel recognizes same-sex marriages performed abroad.
- 2014: Israel passes a law protecting students from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
- 2015: Transgender Israelis can change their legal gender without undergoing surgery.
- 2021: Israel ends restrictions on blood donations from gay and bisexual men.
- 2022: Former Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, Israel’s first openly gay party leader, issues a directive to ban conversion therapy. Israel lifts restrictions on surrogacy for gay and trans couples and single men.
The Tel Aviv annual ‘Pride’ Parade averages over 250,000 attendees, making it the largest such event in Asia and one of the largest in the world.
Magic is also prevalent in Judaism:
. . . Moshe Idel, the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, presented a picture in which magic was a central aspect of Judaism. Magic, he writes in the foreword to the 2004 edition of Joshua Trachtenberg’s Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion, “is a vital form of Jewish spirituality. [Judaism is] deeply informed by magical ways of thinking and manners of action that are conceived to be both effective and licit.”
. . . The rapidly spreading story [about Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination—W.G.] held that 32 days before the assassination, on October 3, 1995, a small group of ten or so fringe national-religious activists, angry at Rabin’s intention to trade land for peace, had gathered outside the prime minister’s home in Jerusalem. It was Yom Kippur Eve—considered the holiest night of the entire Jewish year—and the rabbis, who had fasted for two days in preparation, stood in a circle around two Torah scrolls, blew a ram’s horn and then chanted: “On him, Yitzhak son of Rosa, known as Rabin…we have permission…to demand from the angels of destruction that they take a sword to this wicked man…to kill him…for handing over the Land of Israel to our enemies, the sons of Ishmael.” Known as the Pulsa deNura (“Lashes of Fire”), this ancient Aramaic ritual was first mentioned in the Talmud and then described in greater detail in ancient Hebrew manuals of magic. When performed correctly, the curse was purported to inflict divine wrath on its victims within a year.
After Rabin’s assassination, Pulsa deNura quickly became a household phrase. It remains a canonical element of any recounting of Rabin’s assassination; even the official Israeli government biography of Rabin mentions the curse by name.
. . . Which brings us to today. Not only is Jewish magic alive and well, it has also become trendy. In the United States, Jewish witches or “Jewitches” bring a Jewish angle to New Age practices such as astrology, moon rituals and goddess worship. The Jewitches I spoke with explained that they use magical Jewish rituals and charms to address contemporary concerns such as workplace discrimination and wage disparity. Gilah Levin, a Jewitch living in the Bay area, says, “Magic is an important part of my Jewish heritage. We live in troubling times. The ancient wisdom of Jewish magic helps me bring order to chaos.”
And perhaps it does more as well. A few weeks ago, I had lunch with my childhood friend Rachel and her new baby daughter. Rachel spent close to 15 years attempting to get pregnant. She tried every known fertility drug and in vitro fertilization treatment multiple times, to no avail. She prayed daily to become pregnant. Finally, early last September, she paid an Orthodox rabbi in Israel to perform a segulah (charm) that he claimed would cure her infertility. Following his advice, on each day of Sukkot, hoping that she was already pregnant, Rachel bit off and chewed the pitom or stem of an etrog in order to ensure a safe delivery. In late October she learned that she was pregnant, and this June, at age 49, she gave birth to a healthy baby. There is no way to know how or why Rachel finally got pregnant. But looking at her glowing face and that of her beautiful daughter, I realized that the actual cause didn’t matter. To me, it was magic.
It is interesting how Jewish magic is totally overlooked by Evangelicals. Tucker Carlson discussed the occult and Kabbalah on a recent podcast.
Dr Michael Hoffman offers some deep insights of his own as it regards the Israel-magic connection.
The Ukraine is much the same. The Western-sponsored regime in Kiev is very supportive of the LGBT agenda, per Mr Jim Jatras:
. . . In December 2018, shortly after his “enthronement,” “Metropolitan Epiphanius” (Dumenko) responded to a phone caller claiming to be a Western parliamentarian (but in fact was a Russian prankster), suggesting that “if the new Church softens its position regarding the LGBT community, the gays of Ukraine, and if it takes liberal values, it will be a great stimulus to develop European values. We spoke with Secretary Pompeo and he agrees that you should increase your LGBT and gay values in the future.” Taking the bait, Dumenko said that “because we are moving towards Europe … we should depart from the Russian conservative tradition” and adopt a progressively more “open” position on such matters.
Indeed, the relevant U.S. government officials cheering on Poroshenko and the Ukrainian Church schismatics are remarkably up-front and visible in their advocacy of the LGBT agenda in Ukraine. The website of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev displays Pompeo’s declaration on behalf of all Americans that “the United States joins people around the world in celebrating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTI) Pride Month, and reaffirms its commitment to protecting and defending the human rights of all, including LGBTI persons.”
. . . KyivPride, a local LGBT advocacy group unsurprisingly supported by the U.S. Embassy, the Canadian government, the German Embassy, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and Freedom House were quick to hail the creation of the new pseudo-Church, no doubt reflecting the deep Orthodox piety of the group’s members. As posted by OrthoChristian.com, the organization posted a message on several platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, reading: “KyivPride congratulates all LGBTI Orthodox believers on the formation of a united and independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church and reminds everyone that love does no harm to others! Also remember that Article 35 of the Constitution of Ukraine states: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of personal philosophy and religion. This right includes the freedom to profess or not to profess any religion.’ Human rights above all!’”
Kiev has a Pride Parade now, thanks to American tax payers and the American asset Patriarch of Constantinople who licensed a counterfeit, nationalist, pro-LGBT “Orthodox” Church in Ukraine.
That depraved pattern continues to hold right up to the present moment (e.g., here and here).
And lately there has been a growing effort to decriminalize pornography, to better fund the righteous, pro-LGBT war effort:
Ukrainian MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak, who has initiated bills to legalize pornography, calculated that from 2020 to 2022, 5,000 Ukrainians earned $123 million on OnlyFans.
“Porn today is mostly online platforms, and those who earn on these platforms officially pay taxes. That’s millions of dollars going to the armed forces,” Zhelezniak said on his YouTube channel.
The latest bill to legalize pornography was registered in November 2024 and supported by parliament’s law enforcement committee in December, but hasn’t been brought to a vote yet.
The bill proposes decriminalizing only the creation and storage of pornographic content by consenting adults.
Criminal liability would still apply for revenge porn, deepfake porn, extreme porn, child pornography, and distribution to minors.
Ukraine is already a global hub for sex trafficking. So why make it easier for traffickers to monetize the women they kidnap via online platforms?
Thank goodness they’re drawing a firm line between the good porn and the bad porn! We have to keep a level head about this, after all.
These are the causes – Israel and the Ukraine – that EPs insist on supporting because they have been badly blinded by their bizarre Dispensationalist beliefs and by their adherence to an outdated Cold War paradigm. One where Russia will always be the evil Godless menace, and the US the righteous Christian savior country. The former have received a fair amount of attention, but not the latter. But it ought to be pointed out that upwards of 100,000 churches in the States are expected to close in the coming years, and that they will be transformed into banks, apartments, circus schools, and other non-sacred, profane, and blasphemous uses, while in Russia churches and monasteries that were closed by the communists continue to come back to life (examples: here, here, here, and here). We’re not going to go to the other extreme and declare that everything happening in Russia today is good, but the general trajectories of the two federations, US and Russia, appear to be opposite of one another when it comes to Christianity.
We will refrain from commenting further. The main focus needs to be the glaring immorality that EPs are supporting in the Ukraine and Israel. It is something they will have to confront eventually, whether in this life or after it. The sooner they and their fellow-travelers in the US federal government do so, and repent, the better off they and much of the rest of world will be.
The ideology of “Russian World” is simply another form of Zionism. It should be obvious that there is nothing Christian about modern Zionism, and yet the main proponents of Zionism are in fact Christians.
Similarly, there is nothing Christian about the idea that Ukraine is the territory of Russia, and yet the main proponents of this “Russian World” ideology are in fact Christians.
Both ideologies stand in stark contrast to the words of Jesus Christ who said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” While the Christian Zionists and Russian World Christians may condemn each other, they are actually like mirror images,
Walt, I share your most insightful frustrations with the gullibility among way too many Protestants.
As a Protestant since 1973 (and an Orthodox convert since 2006), I experienced firsthand the solidarity with the ‘chosen people’ of the Holy Land, bull-horned from the pulpit, shoehorned into Bible prophecy, mainstreamed by best selling authors, and assumed as a forgone conclusion within Protestant culture. All that has a way of diminishing one’s powers of upstream critical thinking when everyone around you is merrily riding downstream in ‘Bible-based’ consensus.
As for Protestants’ exuberant proclamations of solidarity in their support of Ukraine’s war against ‘the evil empire,’ the consensus seems a bit more split along political persuasions and, I would add, nurtured along by the talking heads of their preferred ‘trusted’ news source.
Could it be that, in both cases, the mass confusion and denial of which you speak is due, in part, to this generation’s growing accustomed to being spoon fed ‘the news’ by the war-lovin’ globalist propaganda machine? As happens with consuming highly processed foods that masquerades as real food, Protestants have unwittingly normalized their own highly unhealthy yummy diets of manufactured deceptions.
Walt, I don’t know which is worse, though: ‘morally confused’ Protestants supporting Ukraine crooks or the morally corrupt Patriarch Bartholomew, for spearheading the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018 — and the silence of consent of his flock? And, more egregious still, the silence from other patriarchs. Not a peep from my archdiocese, that I’ve heard. No calls for an ecumenical council that I know of.
Just like turfy Protestant denominations, we Orthodox have turned a jurisdictional blind eye to the horrors happening of Ukraine. In that respect, both Protestants and Orthodox need to repent.
Living in the Old Testament is a comfortable, a lukewarm condition. It is theology and wisdom combined and praising the Jews of the old, who were not the modern population coming back from the Eastern European countries with the Socialist mentality.
On the other hand the Evangelicals are actually pleased to know that their kids are doing some activities in those multi-purpose rooms that also serve as sanctuaries. Those activities are shielding the young from the miserable options offered by the free world.
They accept the teaching of the Hagee preachers just to have peace in their minds, and the Sundays to have a focal point different from the sur-realistic world we are living in. There, they are in the Matrix, and at home they turn the TV on and they are in the Matrix of the news.
It is hard to escape the crescendo of Psy-Ops and the Simulations in the process to take over our brains.
An example of that heresy not only has some nebulous spiritual consequence but that it also has tangible and immediate consequences.